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Just mere hours after we published our article speculating that Gus Hansen and Viktor "Isildur1" Blom are no longer part, the rumors were confirmed by Full Tilt. Full Tilt stated that the sponsorship deals have "expired" and that the site is looking to move in a new direction with their marketing.
Full Tilt issued a statement to pokerfuse, in which the reasons for the split are explained. Full Tilt stated that the decision "follows a year-long review of the Full Tilt brand and a decision to move away from Pro-centric advertising to focus on the experiences and stories of the vast majority of our players."
Full Tilt has been implementing casino and table games into their software in the past few months, and is looking to push these games in the forefront more and more.
"Full Tilt will celebrate the excitement, fun and intrinsic enjoyment of playing our poker, blackjack, roulette and slots games."
The company is currently launching a new TV campaign to promote their new business model, and will release additional information later on this week.
The poker community has not been too surprised by the fate of the two Full Tilt Professionals, most players on the forums generally agree that the two players were not very valueable assets to the company any more. Full Tilt had three Professionals that were supposed to bring new players to the tables and be an inspiration for low-stakes players, but their performance has not been very impressive to say the least.
Tom "durrr" Dwan didn't play much online after the FTP relaunch, and left the company when his contract expired. The rumors about Dwan not playing in the durrrr Challenge against Daniel "jungleman12" Cates because he went broke in the Macau high stakes games didn't help the site's reputation either, and the other Professionals couldn't bring much to the table either after Dwan left.
Gus Hansen is the biggest loser in online poker with $20 million in losses, the only player who has lost more than him is billionaire Guy Laliberté, but since he had multiple accounts it is unclear how big his total losses are (some estimate it at around $25 million).
Isildur1 has been on the year's biggest losers list for a long time aswell and is generally considered to be the weak link in many high-stakes lineups. A couple million dollar upswing is always in the cards when the young Swede plays, but his 2014 results and the fact that he doesn't show up for many live events and that he rarely gives interviews when he does explains why Full Tilt decided to drop him aswell.
We have reported plenty of times about poker sites dropping their pros recently, Partypoker parted ways with Marvin Rettenmaier, Ultimate Poker said goodbye to Brent Hanks, William Reynolds, Phil Collins, Jeremy Ausmus and Jason Somerville, while PokerStars let go Marcel Luske, Alex Kravchenko, Joe Cada, Jose "Nacho" Barbero, Angel Guillen and Humberto Brenes.
It will be interesting to see whether any more pros are going to be dropped, and how poker sites will use the money that they save on sponsored pros, with Full Tilt, it's likely that they will try to promote the player-centric, laid-back, fun atmosphere that the "new Full Tilt" aims to offer.